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Thursday, 25 February 2010

Sharpie black marker pens are considered the best for filling in black areas on commercial art and drawing projects and the fine point sharpies below are the best for sketching with and this is something that I do often after I've finished the last stages of the pencil drawings and I can ink over with some black sharpies as they are fade resistant and do not smudge, meaning that they are quick drying which is essential for any artist who likes to work quickly.

The Sharpie range comes in many colours too, not just black so that's why they have diversified with other colours and the colours are quite strong when you apply them to your artwork and don't leave streaky lines that traditional felt tips leave behind when applied to the surface of the paper you are colouring on.

What I prefer to do is to finish a pencil drawing and ink it with a black sharpie pen, then erase any remaining pencil lines with a good kneadable eraser or a cheap rubber and then start to colour with the range of colour pens available, I've got a few tins of Mini Sharpies for some smaller designs, like tattoo art that I create.

Here are a couple of videos that show quick examples of using the black Sharpie marker pens for inking -

Wednesday, 24 February 2010

I've been thinking about increasing my drawing video creations and so here is a silent video that you can follow to draw a skull easily, it's a short video and you can find out a super easy way to draw a skull, now this isn't a really detailed skull it's more along the lines of my type of comic book art style which you see on this blog alot.

Here is the video if you fancy a look at drawing an easy skull

Also see an example of a skull design I created and had Zazzle print it on a T-shirt - Skull Art T-shirt

Through my time on the internet I've seen many artists who draw and create different pieces of art and through each artwork that I look at I gain some unique inspiration from, I usually look at the art or the drawing to study it and see how it was accomplished and that to me is just fantastic when I can recognize how it was made and from the mind of an artist.

You already know that I like to create fantasy art and comic book styled art and tattoos, but what do you like to draw and create? I find stuff like this fascinating and particularly if you can provide a link to your current project then feel free to add it in the comments below.

Monday, 22 February 2010

Demon tattoos are my favourite, so what better way to go through a tutorial than with a how to draw a demon tattoo tutorial and now we can try and do a good solid demon design as that is what looks professional, first of all though you may need to do a few quick sketches of what you want to draw, because quite possibly sometimes you may draw some bad sketches, because like anything you need to warm up first and exercise your drawing hand.

So if you already have an idea of what your demon drawing will look like then select one of your best draft sketches and work on that one, I however have just created something right off the bat and out of my imaginative mind.

The first sketch is the most important, as planning out your full tattoo design is the way of the tattoo artist, so you know how it will look later on I draw some pretty basic shapes to begin with to really find out the overall shape and composition, drawing this way can open up more options for your tattoo drawing as you may accidentally come up with some new design ideas along the way and this is brilliant.

See my first little draft sketch, it's basic, it's raw and it already screams at me to finish it off and I know what I could do next, see the line I drew on the bottom of the oval shape, that will be the demons tongue and the line on the top of the demons head will be the horn, I don't know at this stage whether I'll do two horns, because I may just add something else to balance out the tongue and the horn....it is fun drawing monsters and demons..

Now I like to work over this sketch and try and make some more structure to it, I already know that it will be a demons head, but I want to start adding in the features so that it starts to look evil and demonic, the trick is to start with the eyes, by adding two crossed lines one line vertical and one line horizontal like in the pic below....

You see I have drawn in the eyes and the skull like nose and I've also marked out the teeth roughly as the 2 crossed lines help with all that.

Now it's about adding in more detail, but don't go mad with details if you do intend selling the tattoo or getting it inked yourself as too much detail makes for a good drawing but a bad tattoo, as most tattoo artists will get rid of the details and make the design more fluid anyway, I add in the frown lines around the eyes on other lines to make the demon more evil with some minimal shading, also you will notice that I've drawn in a knife on the opposite side of the demons head, so that it balances the design.

Now we should have a near enough finished design of a demon tattoo, it's a just a case of darkening the pencil lines and making our design more stronger, so any dark areas need to drawn in hard now, ready for the inking stage, here's the drawing as it looks now before inking....

And....

Now onto inking the demon design and I do this with a sharpie marker and a finer ink pen for the details, remember though no super thin lines on your design, try to keep it as simplistic as possible, because when it comes to colouring the design some of them tiny lines may just fill in over time after the design has been tattooed.

Here's the final inked version of our demon tattoo...

Now you could colour it if you wished and that would something for an update on this blog, so just have fun with your demon tattoo drawing and good luck drawing tattoos.

Monday, 8 February 2010

This week I've been looking around at some other drawing tutorials online and I've found a handful of good ones which you may find useful for your own drawing and you may find inspiration in these too.

Over at Dueysdrawings, there are some drawing tutorials basic and advanced, although there are no fantasy based tutorials in sight at the moment, but there are some exceptional step by step guides to drawing a car, and some good quality face drawing tutorials with drawing hair and noses, eyes and teeth included as separate drawing guides.

One things for sure, if the quality of the tutorials are like this now, then when there are more drawing guides in the future, then I reckon they will be even better and I look forward to some varied drawing tutorials.

How To Draw Manga is an online university that has a few great drawing tutorials, although there are only a few manga drawing tutorials, I'm sure there'll be more, the drawing guides covered are fairly basic ones which many do search for how to do anyway with help on drawing manga eyes and ears and with drawing hands and the folds on clothes, in particular I found the quick video guide on applying screen tone very useful, for those who do not know, in manga comics there are elements of tone that can be applied over the artwork with special sheets that can be applied with care on the art directly.

Artshow is another website that has a lot of drawing tutorials that are collected from allsorts of website on the internet, sites like about.com has a great arts resource that I've been reading for over a year now, Helen South is the mian artist guide that presents all of these drawing tutorials at Drawsketch, so try to have a look at all the sites on the artshow page, as there are some great ones.

And lastly Drawspace is one inspiring place for new drawing and art guides of quality artistic stuff to draw, the site is managed by artist and site owner Brenda Hoddinott and has contributions from other great artists and the drawing tutorials on offer are top quality and there are loads to go through all sorted out A to Z, even though the A to Z directory isn't directly alphabetized, I personally found the section on perspective quite helpful from an artists point of view.

Most of the drawing tutorials you can download and print them off for later use which is a great idea when you don't want to get distracted by your computer and so you can concentrate on your drawing projects that you want to learn.

Sunday, 7 February 2010

When drawing a zombies head, there's not really much planning you need to do, but you still need to have an idea of what you want to achieve and with this video series I thought I'd show you how to draw a quick zombies head in three steps that go through the first sketch and then the developmental sketch right through to the finished inked version without the pencil lines rubbed out.

When trying to draw a zombie there are many different ways and I will be going through other ways and also drawing a full zombie figure also as a video series in the future, so I hope this post has been useful.